Today, HP is pleased to announce HP Service Anywhere – Dec ’13 Release, the latest release of our cloud-based ITSM solution. HP Service Anywhere is built for the new style of IT that’s required to harness the dynamic technologies of cloud, Big Data, social and mobile. It connects the IT Service Management landscape with today’s user interactions – driving collective insight, solving problems faster and making better decisions. And it’s powered by HAVEn, HP’s big data platform.

We all know that in today’s competitive market, IT is facing more stress to keep up with the demands of the business—all with a budget that is never enough. In recent years, with the rise of cloud technologies and consumerization trends, IT is faced with higher expectations to deliver services faster, and with a consumer-level experience.

When IT fails to meet these expectations, Lines of Business start seeking alternatives to central IT, often by consuming public cloud services. But in doing so, they often expose the organization to new risks and higher costs. When IT is not able to break through the ceiling created by its own ITSM tools, the gap between IT and the Lines of Business further widens.

What’s hiding in your unstructured data?

HP Service Anywhere December ’13 Release helps bridge the gap between IT and business by unleashing the hidden value within unstructured data, and the social wisdom that’s gone untapped. HP Service Anywhere connects IT and business users into one conversation through the power of what we call Social Insight.

Social Insight is about:

Enabling intelligent employee self-service

Providing business users a one-stop shop for their IT needs – whether it’s about ordering IT services, or finding a solution to their questions and issues

Engaging users with a consumer-level experience that the business user wants and expects

Intelligent employee self-service is targeted at improving the satisfaction of business-users with IT, while giving them a quicker path to the right answer in the context of their problem. The experience is as easy as browsing the web, and is powered by the state-of-the-art, context-aware search enabled by HP HAVEn technologies. On the IT side, intelligent self-service significantly reduces the number of support and request tickets that IT needs to work on. IT finally can focus more time on delivering better and faster services, instead of spending its time on resolving tickets, and be proud of the face it presents to the business.

Social Insight is about providing engaging social collaboration. IT and business are brought together through the social support capabilities that allow business users and IT to crowd-source knowledge, while users can receive help from their appropriate peers. Information is made available from all sources: people, Big Data, wikis, discussions, knowledge bases and documents. Information becomes accessible to everyone as needed, served in the context of the user’s needs. The simple conversations make social collaboration the new normal. Turbo-charged analytics, embedded in the brain of the system and made available through the HP HAVEn platform, make all this happen.

“I’ve heard enough – Show me the money!”

Innovative employee self-service capabilities allow business users to easily find an answer to all their IT needs:

Self-support enabled by knowledge coming from myriad sources of structured and unstructured, managed and semi-managed information

Self-request through a service catalog, via search or context-aware suggestions

Social support that allows people to ask their peers, while background analytics connect the user to the right experts. Social discussions are automatically processed and become an additional available source of knowledge for future users

Great employee self-service experience to address end-users’ needs before they become a ticket for IT to handle

On the IT side – simplified catalog management providing the catalog manager with a WYSIWYG experience, allowing IT to move faster on its service delivery.

Proactive knowledge for IT agents that improves agent productivity when working on requests:

Proactive resolution that surfaces the right knowledge to help address the ticket at hand

A maturity stepping stone for customers who want to benefit from knowledge, but are not yet formally carrying out knowledge management processes

Knowledge can come both from the internally managed knowledge base as well as federated from an external on-prem knowledge base, previously resolved tickets and social interactions.

Separated governance-level process and implementation-level task plans, which minimizes the time it takes to implement a process by focusing on the different users of the system:

Governance-level processes constructed and tailored through the Process Designer, to allow process owners to easily adopt the tool to their needs

Implementation-level task plan constructed and tailored through the Task Plan Editor, to allow implementation/fulfillment managers and implementers to easily create a plan for a ticket

Change models that allow defining standard processes once and reusing many times

Cohesive Service Asset & Configuration practice that serves as an underlying system-of-record layer that is accurate yet pragmatic:

Operational service and infrastructure information seamlessly available through HP Universal CMDB and Universal Discovery – providing the most accurate and up-to-date CI information, while reducing the effort required to maintain it

Asset and configuration lifecycles are managed as part of a single process, providing a simpler management experience for the Asset & Configuration Managers.

In addition, HP ITSM practices for ITIL processes (incident, problem, change, knowledge, service level, service asset and configuration), distilled through years of ITSM experience, are freely available for our customers.

For more information or for a live demo-system, see our product page at

Just in from Barcelona, Spain – a snapshot of the Service Anywhere demo pod – compliments of my colleague Jean-Marc who is on-site there.

See the great visuals delivered by the service. The top panel shows how a customer can customize the service portal “skin” aka background; for the event, the HP team has used a picture of our beautiful host city Barcelona. The lower screen shows reporting and dashboards. Wish I was there!